So Close
by KimoriShadows
Summary: The Cold War has been raging for too long. Neither side will back down. Will all the king's horses and all the king's men be able to put it right?  America and Russia meet on top of the Berlin Wall.


"How did it get so close?" Alfred's voice refused to shake. It wasn't even frightened any more. A silver head turned towards him, that sinister smile like a creeping chill across his pale face. "Cuba was too close. We can't go on like this." How the little upstart had grown.

His silent feet stepped to the edge with a gentle crunch across the snow-topped wall, scarf flicking like the tongue of a snake and hissing at the barbed wire around them.

"You aren't seriously suggesting this is the end, are you, America?" Ivan shot the American an almost entertained glance over his shoulder with those chilling eyes that haunted the dreams of so many.

"It has to be." Alfred's resolve hadn't faded; but they could soon fix that.

"What makes you so sure?" Ivan spoke as if to a child, pushing him for the answer they both understood; but only silence greeted them. The cold wind brushed Russia's hair from his eyes as he looked out over the divided city. If you stared along the wall for far enough, he mused, you could almost see to the edge of time. It was sunrise, and a cold day was stretching its claws over Berlin. Ivan glanced to the foot of the wall on his left.

So they had come too.

In the middle of the silent Berlin street stood his old friends- his new enemies. France, England, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Norway, Denmark. Francis leant on a nearby lamppost, but when he caught the Russian's stare he straightened up and glared back. Some way over, Arthur held an elegant cane with white-knuckled fist. The pair, along with the others on that side, had dark bags beneath their eyes from doubtless too many nights sat alone and awake, and too many more in some glittering bar, drowning their reluctant sorrows in a drink too impure to dim the paranoia that gnawed at their backs. He could tell the name of the last member of the spectators in the West before he saw him- Ludwig. The German, despite the crisp suit they had forced him into, still seemed half-formed, empty. Ivan felt a surge of desire to jump as hard as he could on this wall, again and again, just to see if he could make the German wince. Cough. Clutch his chest and stagger like he had so many years ago- when he had been allowed to hold his loyal gun to the traitor's head and call it mercy as he flexed his finger on the trigger.

Alfred's attention had been caught by a quiet cough from the other side of the wall. Stepping a little closer to the edge, his glasses caught the sunlight as he looked down. And there they were. Of course he had brought them with him. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Finland, Ukraine; there were others he had never seen before- or, at least, never recognised. Each with hollowed cheeks and limbs as limp as discarded marionettes. Hungary, her once-grand dress in tatters, clung to someone's frail form and stared up at the top of the wall with dead eyes, a jagged scar creeping out from under her neckline to mar pale shoulders with pain as white as snow. That someone had his eyes fixed to the floor, bones visible through his loose, worn skin. Gilbert.

"He's here, you know." Arthur nudged Ludwig's half-collapsed form. "Your brother."

Ludwig looked to him with dim, glassy eyes and simply asked, "What good does that do me? What good does that do either of us?"

That was the point Arthur noticed the bloody handprints and smudges across the unforgiving white of the wall, and the second his eyes darted to Ludwig's hands he hid them silently. Clearing his throat, Arthur fixed his gaze back on the pair atop the Wall. "How often?"

Ludwig's reply cracked as he too turned his gaze back to America and Russia, standing within the forest of barbed wire.

"Every night."

"We could kill everyone." Alfred's eyes were guilty as he turned back to the Russian. Ivan, too, shifted back so that they were face-to-face. "At the same time. I press a button- anyone presses that button, and we all go down."

"Did you want it to come to an end like this, America?" Ivan seemed to almost be interested in the answer. "Is this how you saw your great victory?"

"This isn't a victory, Russia." Alfred ground his teeth together. "Don't you see? We both lose! We all lose! We can't win! No amount of lies and no amount of smiles can get rid of this! We've already torn this world apart enough."

Ivan smiled and chuckled, the sound like ivory bells on a moonlit night. "What have we become, America?" He sucked in a desperate breath, and for a heartbeat, Alfred could see that his eyes were not shining with victory but gleaming with tears. "What has made us into monsters?"

And there was only one response America could give.

"You were always the monster."

In a second, both nations were facing down the barrel of the other's gun. America leant forwards slowly, resting his forehead in front of the freezing sight and grinning.

"I dare you."

"You are a fool."

"Go ahead, shoot me! You know you'll pay."

"In the end I will make you pay for every one of those words with your own blood and the blood of your people."

America snorted, stepping backwards and keeping his gun held firmly at the Russian's chest. "I'll have killed you long before then."

"Do you think you can defeat us? Keep on running, America, you're just going in circles."

"Running circles around you, you mean."

"You just try it, little boy."

And thus, there was no war.

There was no happiness or cheer, no comfort for that night or the nights that followed, for each nation was sat alone, huddled over a drink or a fire or a gun or all three, ears listening to the screaming silence that hung above the laughter and conversation.

And all the time the whispers swirled across the floor in noxious, vaporous curls and leaked in through their ears and hissed out of their mouths.

And thus, there was no peace.


End file.
